Eight operations reported having access to a refrigerated truck for food deliveries, and two are willing to share their truck with other farmers. There is no universally used or city-organized process for distributing produce off of urban farms and into the community, yet there exists great interest in aggregating produce or distribution channels , an unrealized goal of urban farmers in the East Bay. All of the food system stakeholders involved in our study are working towards transformative food system change, focused on increasing equity, food security, and access to healthy, locally sourced food. See Box 1 for a description of one of the non-farmer stakeholders engaged in the food recovery and distribution system, who has recently established an aggregation hub to serve as a network for reducing food waste and channeling excess food in the urban community to those who are food insecure.Farmers in our study stressed the importance of producing non-food related values on their farms, including education and community building. One farmer in particular emphasized their organization’s mission of “growing urban farmers growing food,” or teaching other people how to grow a portion of their food basket, thus unlocking food sovereignty and food literacy while increasing healthy food access. Another respondent reported that their farm is “highly desirable for adults with special needs that need a safe place to be outside,” echoing respondents who point out the intimate connection between food and health . Farms frequently reported hosting educational and community-building workshops,hydroponic tables canada cooking and food processing demonstrations, harvest festivals, and other open-to-the-public community events enhancing the resilience and connectivity of people, communities and ecosystems.

Social networks emerged as an important theme for enabling the establishment of urban farms and sustaining operations through social connections between urban farmers and other food justice and health advocates. One farmer described food production and access from a human rights perspective, stating: “We live in a society that is based on profit not human needs. We believe access to healthy organic local food should be a basic right for all of the people.” Our survey results describe a highly diversified East Bay Agroecosystem comprising urban farmers and other food system stakeholders that are growing food as well as food literacy, civic engagement, connectivity, and community. Applying an agroecological lens to interpret our findings of East Bay urban agriculture operations reveals the many agoecological practices farms have long been engaged in, as well as the important distinctions of UAE that still need to be explored, and specific threats to agroecology in urban areas. Pimbert suggests that “agroecology’s focus on whole food systems invites urban producers to think beyond their garden plots and consider broader issues such as citizens’ access to food within urban municipalities and the governance of food systems.” We argue that applying an agroecological lens to the urban context also invites researchers and urban planners and policymakers to think beyond garden plots and singular benefits of food production, to consider these sites as part of a larger agro-ecosystem with synergistic social, cultural and ecological dimensions. We reference the 10 elements of agroecology to illustrate the dynamics of how these elements manifest in practice in this urban context.All of the farms in our survey follow agroecological production practices which include a focus on building soil health through, most commonly, cover cropping, compost application, and no-till practices. These practices produce synergistic effects of adding fertility to the soil through organic matter amendments and boosting water holding capacity. Soil building practices are a response to the impetus to remediate toxins present in urban soils , a prerequisite to intensive cultivation and unique consideration of the urban farm environment.

Overall, production practices on our urban farms seek to conserve, protect and enhance natural resources. Our survey respondents described numerous strategies for enabling diversified, intensive production of fruits, vegetables, and other agricultural products. These strategies span both short and long-term, from planting in raised beds with imported soil, to building soil health in situ via heavy applications of compost, manure, and cover crops for several years leading up to vegetable crop production. There is a growing interest in using no-till practices, which are among the suite of practices associated with “carbon farming” for enhancing soil carbon sequestration . This illustrates a synergistic opportunity for urban food policy and urban climate policy, showing where urban food production and city Climate Action Plans 18 can converge and generate mutual support . Farmers are also engaged in innovative resource recycling and resource use efficiency and other strategies to enhance resilience such as installing rainwater catchment systems in concert with swales and soil health practices to optimize use of this scarce resource. Farms are planting native flowers and shrubs to attract beneficial insects, rather than purchasing chemical inputs for pest management. From a city planning perspective, the impetus to remediate storm water overflows and maintain corridors for essential pollinators are two priorities that can be met through incentivizing and planning spaces for UAE.East Bay urban farms reflect multiple scales and forms of diversity including agrobiodiversity, organizational and participant diversity, diversified sources of capital, labor and land arrangements, as well as diversified modes of exchange. Diversity among operations technically doing the same thing- growing food in cities- signals the fluid, flexible, peripheral, and at times revolutionary nature of urban food production spaces, which may conflict with or resist the institutional, political-economic status quo . Urban farms rely on diverse revenue streams from their diversity of activities beyond sale of produce. These activities, including educational services and community events, are important to elevate in policy conversations. Valuing and therefore protecting urban food production spaces requires thinking differently about them in a context like the San Francisco Bay Area.One stakeholder suggested considering urban farms as museums, providing essential cultural and educational offerings to city residents . The quality of the food and the value of the education, health, and community building, are strong arguments for including urban farms in an urban-agroecological framework for city planning and efforts to improve CFS. The diversity of land access agreements and labor sources used by urban farmers in the East Bay underscores equity considerations in urban agroecological transitions. Farms rely heavily on donated land and volunteer and citizen labor. Even 50% of the for-profit enterprises reported relying on volunteer labor, speaking to both the precarious economics of running an economically viable for-profit food production business in the city, and the interest among young people and aspiring farmers in gaining agroecological cultivation skills through arrangements where they donate their labor free of charge. Volunteer labor substitutes for revenue to a certain degree, allowing farms to exist and distribute food informally without needing to generate much revenue or provide many jobs. In the UA literature, reliance on volunteer labor comes under criticism for being a product of the “neoliberal city,” where responsibility for action falls to the individual rather than the state, and the equity concerns around who is able to volunteer their time are problematized . By reporting the common use of volunteers on East Bay urban farms, we do not seek to promote or valorize this practice,microgreen rack for sale but rather recognize it as a necessary interim step occurring in our study context in the absence of dramatic local government intervention or radical reforms to address community food insecurity: those who are willing and able are participating through civic engagement in urban farms to produce, harvest and distribute healthy food to those in need. Many volunteers are retired or recent graduates, seeking opportunities to contribute meaningfully to their communities. The volunteers we have communicated with generally report positive experiences and enjoyment from their time digging in the soil.

Despite this, it is vital to acknowledge that the goals of food sovereignty underlying agroecology, especially the Nyéléni declaration, imply that food producers need to be able to earn a living to secure other basic needs, farm revenue is needed to sustain operations, and community members need to be able to pay. However, in cities where wages are stagnating relative to the cost of living and the right to remain is under threat to rising property values and rents , affordability of food impacts growers and consumers alike. The critique in the literature against charity in the food system is that the dependence on charitable donations in the food space are a patch for the destructive neoliberal state, which has shifted the burden of social well-being onto the nonprofit sector. Heynen, critiquing the depoliticization of hunger and poverty through charity, asserts that “[c]harity, however well intentioned, has become the means by which the welfare state was successfully rolled back” . At the same time, in exploring the radical democratic politics of groups like Food-Not-Bombs, Heynen describes the kind of anarchist philosophy of mutual aid and cooperativism through food sharing that we see in the East Bay agroecosystem. Farms are not just distributing food to the hungry in hidden basements or exploiting free labor, but engaging in highly visible work, inviting those who visit or consume farm outputs to work, cook, learn, teach, share and get political. The reality is that growing food in cities has particular challenges, increasing the costs of farming on top of issues already outlined regarding the cost of land and labor . We find that the importance of donated money and time to further the anti-hunger and advocacy efforts of farms is not counter to the transformational goals of AE broadly or UAE in particular. In this way, we seek to nuance the premise that volunteer labor is universally problematic and counter-productive to radical food system reform efforts, aligning instead with some urban agroecological scholarship that argues for improved work-life balance through living wage jobs that afford more people opportunities to pursue hobbies and interests and volunteer their time supporting community efforts that align with their values . Pimbert outlines three dimensions of urban agroecological transformation that are needed, including economic, with new forms of organization and relocalized wealth production as well as “creation of free time for citizens to shape and re-govern urban spaces” . Volunteerism has a place in a transformed, equitable, environmentally sustainable local food system, although reliance on it as the primary source of labor is undesirable. Our findings around labor in particular stand in contrast to the often-referenced benefit of urban agriculture as a job creation tool . At least in the current political economic landscape of the East Bay, urban farms do not generate enough economic revenue or city investment in order to hire many full time positions; this remains a goal of many operations and opportunity for policy intervention, especially with respect to enhancing the resilience of urban agroecosystems to economic disturbance.Farms in our case study display a strong focus on reducing hunger and promoting food equity, namely through culturally appropriate diets, and the emphasis on human and social values. Due to the plethora of produce going home with volunteers, circulating at neighborhood crop swaps, and gleaned or harvested by community members that is not weighed and tracked before it is consumed, it is understandably difficult to quantify the “food security” impacts of urban agriculture . While food security may be difficult to quantify, it is nevertheless being addressed by urban farms in unique ways . In school gardens, for example, produce that is not used for classroom cooking demonstrations sometimes goes home with students or families excited to find culturally relevant crops growing in their neighborhood. Supporting healthy, diversified and culturally appropriate diets are an important element of agroecology. The diversity and quality of produce grown, especially when it is an item that might not otherwise be available to a family in a “food desert,” contribute greatly to the value produced on urban farms. One farmer interviewed described how one school garden site serves students from Hispanic, African American, Middle Eastern, Asian, and Eastern European families. The garden teacher spoke about the diversity of crops relevant to various cultural food traditions; for example, the chayote plants were of particular interest to Latinx students excited to bring them home to their mothers, while African American students eagerly collected bunches of collards, and Middle Eastern mothers came to the garden in person to collect fava beans and figs. In this way, urban agroecology contributes to food security and nutrition as well as biodiversity.